Italian rocket company Avio outlines its future rocket plans
Link here. The plans include steady upgrades to its Vega-C rocket, including replacing the upper stage engine presently provided by a Ukrainian company with an engine built by Avio itself.
The bigger development will be a more powerful rocket, the Vega-E, to replace the Vega-C in 2027.
This version of the rocket will retain the first and second stages of the Vega C+ rocket and substitute the third and fourth stages for a single liquid fuel stage powered by the company’s new M10 methalox rocket engine.
The company is also hoping to begin test flights in 2026 of a Grasshopper-type small-scale demonstration rocket leading to the development of a reusable two-stage rocket that would eventually replace Vega-E.
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Link here. The plans include steady upgrades to its Vega-C rocket, including replacing the upper stage engine presently provided by a Ukrainian company with an engine built by Avio itself.
The bigger development will be a more powerful rocket, the Vega-E, to replace the Vega-C in 2027.
This version of the rocket will retain the first and second stages of the Vega C+ rocket and substitute the third and fourth stages for a single liquid fuel stage powered by the company’s new M10 methalox rocket engine.
The company is also hoping to begin test flights in 2026 of a Grasshopper-type small-scale demonstration rocket leading to the development of a reusable two-stage rocket that would eventually replace Vega-E.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in the past two weeks has the mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Avio’s plans are to move in a better direction, but, as with most European space efforts, to do so far too slowly to gain, or even retain, fading market share. This Mediterranean distaste for haste is not going to serve them well in the long term. But, then, given Italy’s terminal demographics, perhaps lack of concern for a long term that nation will not be a part of makes a certain sort of sense.
Hello Dick,
I was thinking of your comment when I stumbled on Gavin Mortimer’s new piece on the UK Spectator today, which paints a very grim picture of not just Italy’s competitiveness, but the EU, full stop — a calamity rooted in horrible demographics, to be sure, but much more than demographics, too (as I know you agree):
On Monday, Mario Draghi, the ex-president of the European Central Bank and a poster boy for the European technocrat class, published a 400-page report on competitiveness that was commissioned by the European Commission in 2023.
Shortly before Draghi published the report, the EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, posted a message on social media saying that she was ‘eager’ to hear what the former Italian PM had to say.
She might not have liked what she heard. Over 400 pages, Draghi laid bare just how sclerotic and uncompetitive the EU has become this century. Things are so bad that Draghi admitted to having ‘nightmares’ about Europe’s future if nothing is done to halt what he described as the ‘slow agony’ of the continent’s economic decline.
In the press conference that accompanied the release of his report, Draghi said that only ‘unprecedented’ reform would arrest the decline. ‘For the first time since the Cold War, we must genuinely fear for our self-preservation, and the reason for a unified response has never been so compelling’, explained Draghi.
He said Europe required additional annual investment of at least €750 billion – approximately 5 per cent of the EU’s gross domestic product – if the EU is to catch up to America and prevent being overtaken by China. It is a damning indictment of how moribund the EU has become that of the world’s leading 50 tech firms only four are European.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-eu-is-disintegrating-before-our-eyes/
Oof.
I wish the new European space startups all the best. There are a few (like RFA) that are quite promising. I hope some can succeed. But the economic and regulatory environment in which they have to operate is going to make it hard going for them, unless things dramatically change.
400 pages just to say “they’re lazy.”